


Bury Me With It

by necrosweater



Series: Little Sunshine [2]
Category: Fallout - Fandom, Fallout 4
Genre: Beginning of Fallout 4, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-17 13:24:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9326717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necrosweater/pseuds/necrosweater
Summary: She stares around her, tired eyes taking in the desolation, the destruction, and thinks she might be crying.Her body is so numb she’s not even sure.She wakes up.





	1. Chapter 1

When she stumbles into the light again - _how long was I down there?_ \- everything’s different. _Wrong, dead, too hot, everything’s dead they’re all dead_. She stops and stands on the elevator for an eternity. She’s out of breath, weirdly, she hasn’t done nearly enough to be so tired after sleeping for however long she’s been out - _how_ long _was I down there?_ \- it’s hardly enough to warrant her current level of fatigue. Maybe it’s a reaction to the cryo - _cold, she’s shivering, her eyes frozen open and forced to watch them shoot her husband and steal her son, she’s so goddamn cold even in the too-intense heat of this angry new sun she doubts she’ll ever truly feel warm again_ \- another shiver wracks up her spine, her stomach turning nervously. 

She stares around her, tired eyes taking in the desolation, the destruction, and thinks she might be crying.

Her body is so numb she’s not even sure. 

After another eternity of standing vacantly on the elevator, she’s shocked by the sound of metal-on-metal. She’s dropped the shock baton she’d found in the vault. Shaken out of her reverie, she sniffs weakly, picks up the club and takes a tentative step forward. When her leg holds her weight- against all odds- she takes another, and another after that. 

She can’t go home. She’s too afraid to face the bombed out remains of her neighborhood and know that everyone who used to live there with her is either trapped in the vault below with Natty - _poor Nate, she’d taken his wedding ring and curled herself into his cold, too hard lap, crying pitifully for what felt like forever_ \- suffocated on their own thawing breath, or burned up from the bombs. No, she’s not ready for that, yet. She takes another unsteady breath and aims herself in the general direction of Anywhere-But-There-Or-Here and shambles forward. 

She’s been walking for a long time. A few minutes of tinkering with the Pip-Boy she’d scavenged off the skeleton - _she still can’t believe she touched a skeleton, can’t believe she’d had to hold Natty’s corpse_ \- and she’d been able to find a screen that said the time - _the machine had to be wrong, it’s not 2287, it can’t be_ \- and after having yet another mental break after reading the year, she’d decided to make her goal finding some sort of shelter. It’s been over 200 years since the bomb, she has no idea what to expect. Are there still people? Is she the last human left on earth? The thought would be enough to drive her mad, so she puts it out of her head. _Of course I’m not alone here_ , she tells herself. _Someone took my baby, and I need to find him._ Before that, though, she needs to prepare. She might have been impulsive, in her old life, but she’d known how to prepare, her long list of successful cases was a testament to that.

She wonders if they still exist. 

To her right, she hears a dim buzzing sound. When she looks, she discovers that she can, in fact still feel something other than the vast emptiness that’s been occupying her since she left the vault. 

Ten yards out, is the largest, most terrifying and disgusting mosquito she’s ever laid eyes on. _First roaches, now mosquitos, why of all things did the fucking bugs have to survive and get so goddamn huge?_ It’s flitting around, darting through the woods making that familiar whirring hum, amplified from annoying to bone-chillingly horrifying by its impossible size. It locks onto something and buzzes away with a purpose. 

She bites back her fear and follows as quietly as she can behind it, deftly avoiding branches and rocks in her way. The mosquito leads the way to something even more horrible-bad-wrong and she almost drops her baton again in shock. 

It’s a human, she thinks, or at least it once was. The thing is hunched over, rasping and swinging it’s gnarled hands at the bug wildly. The mosquito lands a few disgusting attacks, sucking blood out before, appallingly, shooting gobs of it back in the creature’s face. She shifts her grip on the baton, feeling it start to get slippery with sweat. Her knuckles are white where they show through the large amounts of tattoos that cover her hands. After a short scuffle, the thing manages to grip the bug in one of its mangled hands, and rips it apart, blood spraying absolutely everywhere. She tries not to gag as it drops the crushed bug, and continues on its ambling way.

She decides to follow it, because she has no idea what else to do, and the sun isn’t going to stay up forever. She doesn’t want to know what happens out here after dark, and if nothing else maybe it’ll lead her to some shelter. She tries to tell herself she’ll be able to kill it once they get there. The creature shambles, growling as it meanders slowly ahead, and she creeps along behind it, wishing that it would speed up. 

Dusk is falling as they crest a hill, and she sees they’re nearing an old pre-war high-voltage tower. At some point after the bombs, someone has built some sort of shack onto it, and what looks like a farm. She sees a few shapes moving around the yard, and as they get closer she realizes they’re people. She sends up a quick thanks to any god that might still be listening; she’s not completely alone. Closer still and she can make out that there’s a young woman tending the crops and an older woman standing off to the side, smoking a cigarette and looking off into the distance. Distant gunfire can be heard from that direction, where Concord used to be. She shudders slightly. After the end of the fucking world, there’s still fighting. 

The creature breaks out into a run when they get close enough to the farm, and she jogs after it cautiously, in what she hopes is a stealthy manner. Maybe it lives there? 100 yards from the farm, she hears the pop of a gun, not distant this time. The thing drops suddenly, and she hears the sound again.

A sharp pain in her left thigh sends her falling to the ground. Another loud sound stretches on, and she thinks she maybe tripped an alarm of some sort before the realization happens. The sound is coming from her. She’s screaming.

A man is crouching down over her, trying to get her to stop screeching, but she won’t stop, she can’t. Flailing her arms in a blind panic she tries to smack at him with her hands. Where did her weapon go? He’s grabbing at her arms and she’s hysterical, she’s never been shot before and it _fucking hurts_.

“You shot me,” she’s yelling, her voice wild and rusty from disuse. “You fucking shot me, what the fuck, oh my god you shot me it hurts _you shot me_.” It’s all she can say, and so she keeps screaming it, eyes wide. She’s covered in cold sweat, except for where her thigh is getting soaked in something warm that she knows isn’t supposed to be leaving her body like that. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can hear a voice coaching her. Long ago, when she was a kid her dad had taught her how to box after she found an old pair of gloves and a punching bag at someone’s garage sale. Like a switch flipping in her brain, she suddenly remembers how to fight. 

Taking a deep breath, she makes a fist, feeling it connect with the man’s nose in a satisfying crunch. Her other fist quickly slams into his jaw, shoving him off of her. The adrenaline racing through her veins is enough that she’s able to fight her way onto her feet and attempt to scramble towards the shack, not sure what she’ll do when she gets there. _What if there’s more of them, I can’t take on more than one, and there’s the two in the field…_ She can see more red on her hands than just her tattoos, her knuckles on the right hand are split and bleeding.

She manages to limp a few feet before she feels a shock race up her spine. _The shock baton._ She goes stiff and her body hits the ground again, hard. Her vision wobbles for a few seconds while her ears ring, and she hears the mutter of voices around her before her vision goes black, blissfully quiet and dark. 

The Abernathy family stands around the fallen woman in the blue jumpsuit and stare at her for a moment, catching their breath after all the excitement. 

“Well, shit.” Blake finally mutters around the break in his nose. “Now what?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"You're probably wondering how I got myself in this situation. Yeah, it looks pretty bad"_ -Mickey Cochran, probably, 2287

When she wakes up, her head feels fuzzy. _Where did we go last night?_ is her first, groggy thought, followed by _hey Natty-Boy, be a doll and pass me the ibuprofen when you’re done with it._ Her mouth hasn’t felt so cottony in the morning since she was 24, and she’s about to go reach for the glass of water she always keeps at the bedside when the realization hits. This is definitely _not_ her bed. It’s not even a bed at all. She’s laying on a half-rotted out mattress. Her arms are tied loosely behind her back, and one of her ankles is cuffed to… something. A little wiggling shows her that it’s the leg of a chair. 

“Hey.” She starts at that, a gruff, unknown voice. _What the impossible fuck is going on here?_ She forces her sleep-sandy eyes to drag up to where the voice is coming from, barely registering a bruised and vaguely familiar face, and wracks her addled brain trying to remember what happened to lead up to the current, incredibly confusing events. The past day or so is a dizzying haze of pain, fear, and panic. She groans, turning her face back into the ruined mattress and deciding to deal with this bullshit later. Her entire body is just so sore.

“Lady. I know you’re awake, I saw you moving.” This man has no respect for her tired eyes, her decision to run from all her problems, or her pounding aching head. He’s probably got no respect for knights, either. No respect for anything.

She groans again, trying to form words to voice some sort of complaint and maybe to lobby for better treatment, but she can’t. After a moment, her poor brain works it out. The cotton-mouth situation. It’s literal. There’s actually some sort of fabric stuffed into her mouth. Before she can fully panic, her disrespectful and loud captor reaches down to pull the wadded up cloth from her mouth, freeing it up to say something stupid and ill-advised, as per usual. 

“Woah there, boss, watch the paws there. Might wanna buy a gal dinner before you go shoving junk in her face, yeah?” The man looks at her like he’s considering the pros and cons of gagging her again, so she does what comes naturally and starts running at the mouth. “Or not, it’s cool, I don’t care. You know, at this point this may as well fucking happen, right?” _Backpedal, woman, backpedal! Figure out what’s going on, and hopefully finagle yourself into a less shitty situation!_ “Firstly- and just know I’d be counting these points off on my fingers, but you’ve kind of taken that option away from me here- uh… who are you? Why am I hogtied in your weird little hovel-house? Secondly, have ya thought to look in the mirror recently? ‘Cause, uh. You got a real mess going on in aisle three.” Throughout her word vomit, the man just sits there, and stares at her, fiddling with something he’s holding that she can’t see. _Looks promising…?_

Before she can continue on her tirade, the object he’s been messing with explodes into light, making it incredibly difficult to see. She smells chemicals, and realizes he’s holding a lantern, it must have some sort of reflective focuser to point _directly into her fucking face_. Is this an interrogation? She squints, trying to shake her messy hair into her eyes to shield them a little. 

She tries to swallow around the dryness in her mouth and throat, thinking fast. Notices the overall busted feeling going on in her hand region, and puts two and two together. “Ohhhh… _oh, shysa_...” she rapidly backtracks through her memory bank, mentally digging through the mess of her recent life to figure out what’s going on, and manages to come up empty. “I think we got off on the wrong foot, probably, because I’m tied up on the floor feeling like shit, and you’re sitting on a chair above me, doing your damndest to blind me, I’m guessing you’re still looking… angry, and like shit…” They stare at each other awkwardly, her with only one eye cracked and pointed in his general direction. Him, probably still glowering at her past his beaten up nose. “So uh, anyway. I’m Mickey, last name Cochran. I’d offer my hand to shake, but as we’ve established, I’m tied up on your floor.” 

The man sighs, rubbing a hand carefully through his red beard. “Charmed. If you don’t mind I’m gonna leave your hands tied there until I know a little more about you and your intentions here. You, little lady, can do some damage.” Her heart sinks. _Tough customer._ He turns in his seat slightly and yells over his shoulder. “Connie? Lucy! Our guest is awake!” 

Mickey flops back onto the mattress, furrowing her eyebrows impressively and heaving her biggest sigh yet in protest. “If this is your idea of a guest room, have I got some suggestions for you. I bet you can guess at least _ooooone_ ,” she sings the last word out at least three syllables longer than it’s supposed to be, staring at the ceiling. “Here’s a hint, boss, in case you can’t guess: it’s that you should stop having me be tied up on your floor. Just a thought. Y’know, if your suggestion box happens to be open.”

**• • •**

He doesn’t untie her. A couple of women had come into the room, one older and one younger. From the way they act, Mickey assumes they’re a family. It makes her wonder about her own. 

Then, laying on this shitty mattress, counting the boards that make up the ramshackle roof of the shack, her mind has a breakthrough. 

The bombs. The vault. She’s lost her family. It’s been over 200 years, and somehow, in her confusion at being held captive in this asshole’s shed, she’d forgotten. 

“I swear, she was carrying on just a minute ago,” the man is saying, sounding kind of exasperated that as soon as he called his family in, she’d closed off. Mickey can’t bring herself to give half a shit. “Hey, lady. What’d she say her name was again… Mickey? Lady, hello?” She weighs her options. On the one hand, she could keep going down this dark spiral (she really wants to) and turn her face back into the filthy mattress, ignoring these people and seeing what they decide to do with her. On the other hand, she could try to communicate with them, see what the fuck is going on, and get out of here. That sounds like a lot of effort. 

She remembers that someone had taken her baby, and her mind is made up, easy.

“Jesus Christmas, if you won’t untie me can you at least stop shining that light in my face? End of the world happens and everyone’s goddamn manners go with it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter today, throwing it out there before I go to work! I've been working on the last bit to A Way Out, and then it's leading into a new Mickey story that I'm sure you'll never be able to guess the plot of... xoxo

**Author's Note:**

> I'm motivated, so I figured I'd pump this one out. I'm motivated, so I'm going to try to keep writing (it's one of my resolutions this year) and get out those last few chapters of A Way Out, which will be my first Finished Multi-chapter Fic Ever! 
> 
> Mickey deserves better, so I'm going to try to keep updating this series regularly.


End file.
